Tag: East Turkistan

Turkish PM to raise Uighur mass killing in G8 summit

[ 09 Jul 2009 18:25 ]
Baku – APA. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will raise the issue of bloody events in Xinjiang-Uighur autonomous region of China in the G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy.

On his departure for the G8 summit, Erdogan told journalists that he will raise the issue of mass killing of Uighurs to the G8 leaders, including the US, APA reports quoting Haberturk. “Our foreign ministry invited the Chinese ambassador and gave a notice to him. We demanded to end this wildness soon. I will discuss this issue with the world leaders. It is impossible for Turkey to keep silence toward this wildness”.

Erdogan said Turkey was ready to give a visa to the leader of World Uighur Congress Rebia Kadeer, who lives in exile in the United States, if she asks them for it. Chinese communist regime accused Kadeer in the masterminding of unrests and said she instigated the Uighurs in China.

July 9, 2009
Clampdown on Uyghur Cities

2009-07-09

Chinese security forces crack down on cities with large Uyghur populations.

AFP

Chinese paramilitary police trucks drive through downtown Urumqi, July 9, 2009.

HONG KONG—Chinese security forces imposed an uneasy peace on several major cities in the restive Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) Thursday, with residents reporting a heavy security presence in Kashgar and Ili prefectures.

Police and armored vehicles were patrolling the streets of Gulja (in Chinese, Yining), capital of the Ili Kazakh Prefecture, residents said.

“Now the situation in Gulja city is very tense,” one Uyghur man said.

“When I went out this morning to buy cooking oil, I saw the streets were filled with fully armed police wearing helmets.”

“I personally saw five armored vehicles driving along the street. There were so many police cars on all of the streets,” he said.
He said the gates of government buildings in the city were under heavy guard by armed police.

“Since I was not able to enter from the front gate to the Ili Normal Institute where I live, I came home going through a gate behind the school that was guarded by our school security personnel,” he added.

Protests spread

Demonstrations spread out to other Uyghur cities in the region following Sunday’s deadly riots in Urumqi in which at least 156 people died and 1,080 were injured.

One Uyghur man who called a listener hotline said more than 300 people gathered around Kashgar’s Id Kah Mosque, Guze district, and People’s Square to demonstrate, but were quickly dispersed by security forces.

He said police were currently conducting house-to-house searches in the city. Detentions have been reported by residents in Yili, Dawan, and Tianshan.

Official media reported that tourism had been hit by the recent unrest, saying some travel agencies had canceled trips to Ili and Kashgar.

Police in Gulja recently detained a number of Uyghur youths in an anti-separatism campaign ahead of the sensitive 60th anniversary of communist rule, sources in the region said.

Overseas rights groups say untold numbers of people were killed in anti-China protests in Gulja in February 1997, in a crackdown that went largely unnoticed by the outside world.

Meanwhile, in Urumqi, thousands of Chinese paramilitary police rumbled through Urumqi’s riot-battered streets Thursday, blaring propaganda urging ethnic unity.

Uyghur residents said however that armed majority Han Chinese were still visible on the streets of the city Wednesday.

“The Chinese are on the streets, holding batons and clubs. They are attacking some shops. But I have not personally seen anyone injured or killed,” one Uyghur man said.

“When the Chinese came out with batons and clubs, there is no one to stop them. They are pretending to stop them, but they are not really strict,” he said.

“If the Uyghurs had come out with batons and clubs, they would immediately be fired upon.”

Media blamed

The Uyghur man, a university student, said the relative media freedom around the Urumqi violence still appeared to be inciting further unrest.

“I think the government and the media are instigating the Chinese to seek revenge,” he said.

“The government is trying to portray the conflict between itself and the Uyghurs as a conflict among the people.”

A Uyghur women in Urumqi said some Uyghurs were afraid of further attacks, while others were outraged at a perceived difference in treatment of Uyghurs and Han protesters and rioters.

“If the government was as cruel towards them as they were towards the Uyghurs, they surely would be able to take care of the problem in a moment,” she said.

She said many in Urumqi expected worse to come. “It seems that there are going to be big problems. Everyone is talking about it.”

A second Uyghur student said police had held two groups of Uyghur and Han Chinese students at two universities apart.

“Today there was some friction between the Uyghur and Chinese students at the Xinjiang University of Medicine and Xinjiang University of Economics (XUE),” he said.

“Today, the students at XUE were about to go out and confront the Chinese rioters, but the police surrounded them, and did not allow them to go out.”

He said all able-bodied Uyghur young men had been removed from Uyghur neighborhoods in recent days.

“It is as if there are no men on our streets. I hope these people don’t come to where we live,” he added.

Warnings posted

Authorities posted notices urging rioters to turn themselves in or face stern punishment.

Urumqi Communist Party chief Li Zhi said he would seek the death penalty for rioters who resorted to “cruel means” and murdered people.

The notices, posted on walls in the Chinese and Uyghur languages, said those who hid or protected “criminals” would also be punished.

The Chinese government has accused exiled Uyghur leader Rebiya Kadeer of inciting the violence.

But exiled Uyghur groups say the Muslim, Turkic-speaking minority has long suffered ethnic discrimination, religious controls, and continued poverty despite China’s ambitious plans to develop the vast hinterland to the northwest.

Xinjiang is a strategically crucial vast desert territory that borders Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.

The region has abundant oil reserves and is China’s largest natural gas-producing region.

This week’s violence prompted President Hu Jintao to abandon a G8 summit in Italy, and he has returned home to monitor developments in Xinjiang where hundreds have been arrested in the ensuing crackdown.

Original reporting in Uyghur by Shohret Hoshur and Mehriban. Uyghur service director: Dolkun Kamberi. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/clampdown-07092009101424.html

July 9, 2009
China’s Latest Tibet

Why Beijing won’t compromise in Xinjiang.

BY JOHN LEE | JULY 6, 2009

After scolding the West for interfering in the internal affairs of Iran, Beijing’s public relations department will now be on the defensive following riots in Urumqi, the capital of the westernmost region of Xinjiang. Chinese state media has admitted that 140 people have been killed and almost 1,000 arrested. Hundreds had taken to the streets to protest the local government’s handling of a clash between Han Chinese and Uighur factory workers in far southern China in late June, in which two Uighurs died. The police responded to the rallies with force, claiming that the unrest was the work of extremist forces abroad and that a heavy reaction was necessary to bring the situation under control.

Given the region’s population of 20 million — barely 1.5 percent of the country’s people — many are wondering: Why has Beijing taken such a hard line in Xinjiang? The reason is summed up in one of the ruling party’s favorite mantras: “stability of state.” Unrest of even a small magnitude, the Chinese authorities believe, can spell big consequences if it spirals out of control.

Instability of the sort in Xinjiang today is hardly new for China. Behind Shanghai’s glamour and the magnificence of Beijing, there are large swaths of disunity and disorder. Taiwan, which mainland China still claims as its own, remains recalcitrant and effectively autonomous. Residents of Hong Kong want guarantees that Beijing will not dismantle the rights they enjoyed under British colonial rule. And traditional Tibetans, who fear a complete political and religious takeover by the ethnically Han majority, want cultural and administrative autonomy — even if most have abandoned hopes of achieving outright secession. Many of the 10 million Uighurs in Xinjiang want the same. The current violence is just the latest manifestation of their simmering anger.

There is widespread disorder even in provinces that pose no challenge to Beijing’s right to rule. In 2005, for example, there were 87,000 officially recorded instances of unrest (defined as those involving 15 or more people) — up from just a few thousand incidents a decade ago. Most protests are overwhelmingly spontaneous rather than political; they arise out of frustration among the 1 billion or so “have-nots” who deal with illegal taxes, land grabs, corrupt officials, and so on. To deal with the strife, Beijing has built up a People’s Armed Police of some 800,000 and written several Ph.D.-length manuals to counsel officials on how to manage protests. Those documents detail options to deal with protest leaders: namely the tactical use of permissiveness and repression, and compromise and coercion, on a case-by-case basis. The tactics are designed to take the fuel out of the fire. Sometimes leaders of protests are taken away; other times they are paid off; still other times they are given what they want.

Much of this is done quietly, which is perhaps why the current riots stand out. When it comes to what Beijing sees as separatist behavior, subtlety is no longer an option. Although their populations are relatively small, Xinjiang and Tibet together constitute one third of the Chinese land mass, and Beijing will not tolerate losing control over these territories. To be sure, the protesters in Urumqi and their supporters cannot spark an uprising throughout China. The protests will eventually be quelled, and their leaders will no doubt be dealt with brutally. But as the history of the Chinese Communist Party tells us, when the regime’s moral and political legitimacy is threatened, the leadership almost always chooses to take a hard, uncompromising line.

President Hu Jintao, who incidentally earned early brownie points within the party by leading a crackdown of political dissidents in Tibet in 1989, understands better than anyone that authoritarian regimes appear weak at their own peril. Losing face, he believes, will only embolden the “enemies of the state.” The Communist Party’s Leading Group on Foreign Affairs, which is chaired by Hu, has often spoken warily about the democratic “viruses” behind the “color revolutions” in Ukraine and Georgia, and perhaps eventually Iran — the same kind that could conceivably take root in places such as Xinjiang and Tibet. This is why Chinese authorities are deeply suspicious of any group with loyalties that might transcend the state and regime or at least cannot be easily controlled by the state, such as the Falun Gong, Catholics, or independent trade unions.

It’s important to remember that, at home, the government’s hard line is not wholly unpopular. Most Chinese do not support the separatist agendas of Tibet, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. They would rather see a strong and unified China restored to historic glory. No wonder then that the Chinese state media has been quite upfront about reporting on the current unrest in Urumqi.

Chinese leaders learned much about control in their extensive studies of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their conclusion is clear: It was Mikhail Gorbachev’s ill-fated attempts to be reasonable that brought down that empire. The current generation of Chinese leaders is determined not to make the same mistake. And that means no compromise in Xianjiang.

July 7, 2009
Sources in Urumqi? They’re (very) hard to come by.

Given political sensitivities and a Stalinist grip on the region’s population, no one – from Uighurs on the street to Beijing intellectuals – appears willing to talk.

By Peter Ford | Staff writer 07.06.09

BEIJING –Trying to work out what on earth happened Sunday night in Urumqi, where the government says that at least 140 people died in a riot, is proving about as hard as getting an interview with President Hu Jintao.

The key question is: Who died? Muslim Uighur demonstrators, cut down by the police, as Uighur exile groups claim? Or innocent Han Chinese bystanders, butchered by a mob of Uighurs, as the government-owned media are making out?

Getting any Uighurs in Urumqi to talk on Monday was impossible. Their Internet access had been cut off, most of their phones, too, and those whom foreign journalists reached were too terrified of the government to say anything.

Xinjiang, an allegedly autonomous region, is the hardest place I have ever worked. The atmosphere of repression is Stalinist. For a week last year I tried to gauge ordinary people’s feelings there about the authorities. Not one person I spoke to would give his real name, and most whom I approached wanted nothing to do with me.

They knew I was being watched by the Chinese secret police, and they knew they would get into trouble for talking to a foreign reporter. Frankly, I did not call any Uighurs anywhere in China on Monday, for fear of the repercussions they would face for even getting a call from me.

But what was really astonishing was the reluctance of Chinese scholars to say anything about why they thought the riot had broken out. Perhaps because they did not want to diverge from the party line, perhaps because they did not yet know what the party line was, none of the local Xinjiang experts whom I called Monday would talk to me.

One simply hung up when I announced who I was. Another – a scholar of China’s border territories – said that he was working only on Tibet, not on Xinjiang. (When I called him last March to talk about Tibet, he told me that he had nothing to say because he was working only on Xinjiang….)

A third, his wife said, had been unexpectedly detained at a conference out of town and was mysteriously unreachable on his cellphone.

So, faced with a sensitive political issue, defenseless Uighur men-in-the-street and well-placed Beijing intellectuals all found themselves in the same boat: voiceless.

July 7, 2009
Armed Mobs Throng Urumqi

2009-07-07

Witnesses say thousands of armed Han Chinese are on the streets of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s capital vowing revenge after a deadly clash.

AFP

Han Chinese march with sticks and shovels on a street in Urumqi, July 7, 2009.

UPDATED JULY 7, 1730 GMT

HONG KONG—An angry crowd of several thousand ethnic majority Han Chinese has gathered in Urumqi following weekend riots, amid a welter of rumors surrounding deadly clashes between Muslim Uyghurs and police, according to initial reports from foreign journalists and exiled Uyghur groups overseas.

“Chinese civilians, using clubs, bars, knives, and machetes, are killing the Uyghurs,” the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress said in a statement.

“They are storming the university dormitories, Uyghur residential homes, workplaces, and organizations,” it said, accusing the mob of killing unprotected Uyghur civilians.

Foreign correspondents on the ground in Urumqi said they saw armed crowds of thousands of Han Chinese running through the capital of the northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR).

“Two police officers just escorted a Uyghur woman with a baby through a Han crowd with clubs by the People’s theater,” Time correspondent Austin Ramzy wrote via the real-time micro-blogging platform Twitter.

Telegraph correspondent Peter Foster reported via Twitter from Urumqi that thousands of armed Han Chinese had gathered near a mosque in Shanxi Alley in downtown Urumqi.

Police tried to calm the crowd, which was armed with “snooker cues, axes, machetes, baseball bats, metal scaffolding poles, cattle prods, and a plastic mop handle,” according to Foster’s updates.

Meanwhile, Al-Jazeera correspondent Melissa K. Chan tweeted, also from Urumqi, “A Han Chinese man with a stick just tore open our car door to beat our producer. Averted just in time.”

Chan said Urumqi was now under martial law. Official media also reported further unrest. Two separate estimates by foreign journalists at the scene put the crowd at around 10,000.

Despite Chinese officials’ decision to cut off the Internet and mobile phones, pictures, videos and updates from Urumqi poured into social-networking and image-sharing websites including Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr.

A Han Chinese employee at a youth hostel in downtown Urumqi said, “We have a curfew now and troops are everywhere.”

“We can still can drive on the streets—but I don’t know if the situation will get worse so I stored some bottles of water and instant noodles,” the employee said.

“More Han Chinese live in Urumqi than Uyghurs now,” he said. “Many Uyghurs are afraid to go out now. They have their own friends, and we won’t try to be their friends.”

“Before it was them attacking us. Now it’s our turn to attack them,” another Han Chinese resident said.

But a municipal official downplayed the tensions.

“We are coming to work as usual. What do you mean, take to the streets? We will see what happens. Ask again later,” the official said.

“Of course there have always been ethnic separatists. They have existed for a long time. They are always looking for ways to make trouble. They will do it as soon as they spot an opportunity,” the official added.

Chaos and vigilantes

Police fired tear gas repeatedly at the protesters but they refused to disperse. Police were blocking them from getting through to an area of Urumqi populated by Uyghurs, who authorities have blamed for riots on Sunday that left 156 people dead and more than 1,000 injured.

China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported similar scenes in other parts of Urumqi.

“Chaos was seen in a number of places in Urumqi on Tuesday afternoon,” the official Xinhua news agency reported.

Back in Urumqi, al-Jazeera’s Chan tweeted: “There is no right or wrong anymore. Just vigilantes, Han and [Uyghur]. Mostly men but some women and even children.”

“I asked a Han Chinese girl if she was scared. Yes. But this is to defend my country, she says with stick in hand.”

The World Uyghur Congress said it had received several reports of deaths at the hands of Han mobs in different locations in Xinjiang, which is home to a population of Turkic-speaking Uyghurs, many of whom oppose Beijing’s rule, and a growing influx of migrants from the rest of China.

Ethnic tensions have simmered for decades, with Uyghurs saying they are subject to racial discrimination and have scant access to the fruits of China’s breakneck economic growth of the past 30 years.

China has said some overseas Uyghur separatist groups are connected with international terrorism.

Foster reported via Shanghai-based Telegraph correspondent Malcolm Moore that some of the crowd were comparing exiled former Uyghur businesswoman Rebiya Kadeer to al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden.

The Congress statement said: “[A] Uyghur young man was mutilated on [Urumqi’s] Dongbeilu. A Uyghur woman who was carrying a baby in her arms was mutilated along with her infant baby on Huanghelu.”

Witnesses on the ground said the mood of the crowd was ugly, with a group of Han Chinese protesters attacking Telegraph correspondent Foster and his assistant, who were protected by police.

The Uyghur Congress said Chinese security forces were “not taking any action” against the attackers, and that it had received telephone threats from “ethnic Han Chinese” at its headquarters in Munich.

A Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tuesday that Sunday’s violence in the region was not a peaceful protest, but “evil killing, fire-setting, and looting.”

Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regular news briefing: “Anybody calling the violence a peaceful protest is trying to turn black into white in an attempt to mislead the public.”

Urumqi Communist Party chief Li Zhi went to the scene, addressing the crowd and calling for calm. The crowd roared soon after, before rushing off in the other direction, witnesses said.

Earlier, Li had told reporters: “We immediately reinforced the emergency prevention and control measures after the riots started. Security was dispatched to the four main areas of unrest, and they swiftly took care of the matter in accordance with the law.”

Internet curbs, media strategy

Also Tuesday, Li confirmed at a news conference that authorities there had cut off Internet access in parts of Urumqi to stop the flow of information that it saw as a dangerous threat.

“We cut the Internet connection in some areas of Urumqi in order to quench the riot quickly and prevent violence from spreading to other places,” Li said.

The Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders accused authorities of wanting to see Urumqi “cut off from the rest of the world.”

“Once again, the Chinese government has chosen to cut communications in order to prevent the free flow of information. We firmly condemn this behavior,” the organization said in a statement.

Many phone lines have been disabled since the violence erupted, but others remain in working order.

Netizens inside China said the personal update service Twitter, which is frequently used to transmit keywords, news and photos around the Chinese Web at a speed that eludes China’s censors, was blocked.

“Twitter is blocked: In another act of net-nanny folly Twitter.com has been blocked on the Chinese mainland,” media analysis blog Danwei commented via the service Monday.

Other users said the service was still accessible using third-party applications elsewhere on the Web.

They said sensitive keywords such as “Xinjiang” were currently returning no search results on the Chinese Web, either.

“Why is it that the moment something happens, the first thing they think of is blocking it?” user Keso tweeted. “Surely the fact that they do this shows that there are skeletons in the closet?”

Authorities have meanwhile taken the unusual step of bringing foreign reporters to Urumqi to learn about the incident and setting up a media center in a city hotel.

This contrasts with Beijing’s virtual blackout on previous instances of unrest, such as the Tibetan uprising of early 2008, but is in keeping with its handling of media immediately after the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

But that initial openness ended amid allegations that corruption had resulted in shoddy construction of school buildings that collapsed in the quake.

Shenzhen-based media commentator Zhu Jianguo said official media reports seemed to be intensifying conflicts rather than soothing them.

“They are putting out information at a much faster speed than previously but their approach is exactly the same as it always has been,” Zhu said, suggesting the coverage was one-sided.

“Now the incident has erupted into racial conflict, and it’s not a simple racial conflict either. It’s all over the country—it’s a crucial point at which the government faces off against the people.”

Original reporting by RFA’s Uyghur, Mandarin, and Cantonese services. Written for the Web in English by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Sarah Jackson-Han.

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/xinjiang-07072009054344.html

July 7, 2009
Ethnic Unrest Continues In East Turkestan

Ethnic Uyghur women grab at a riot policeman as they protest in Urumqi, Xinjiang province, on July 7.

July 07, 2009

There are reports of continued violence in China’s autonomous Xinjiang region, with police dispersing unruly crowds of the country’s predominant Han ethnic group and scattered clashes between Han Chinese and Uyghurs.

Han Chinese demonstrators smashed shops thought to be owned by minority Muslim Uyghurs in the regional capital, Urumqi, two days after ethnic unrest in the city that officials blamed on Uyghurs left more than 150 people dead. Police said more than 1,400 had been arrested.

Meanwhile, dozens of Uyghurs faced off against police to protest the arrest of relatives since the rioting began, and authorities imposed a nighttime curfew in the city to prevent further “chaos.”

Security forces have a heavy presence in the area in an apparent effort to prevent tit-for-tat attacks pitting Uyghurs, who represent about half of Xinjiang’s 16 million residents, against ethnic Han Chinese, who make up the overwhelming majority of the country’s 1.3 billion people.

Chinese officials blamed the July 5 riots on the Germany-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC) and other Uyghur separatists, a charge the WUC has dismissed as a knee-jerk response from Beijing.

In an interview with RFE/RL’s Uzbek Service on July 7, WUC President Rebiya Kadir rejected Chinese accusations that she or her organization was in any way involved.

“They say that I am to blame for these events, but I am in no way responsible for this,” said Kadir, who lives in exile in the United States.

“In fact, it is China’s government that caused this. China’s government for the past 60 years has suppressed not only Uyghurs but all Turkic nations such as Uzbeks, Kazakhs, and Kyrgyz. They put tens of thousands of them into prisons. But now the nation knows what democracy is, and it went out to protest.”

Kadir put the put the true number of dead so far, “according to our information,” at more than 400. But there was no way to confirm that figure.

She also said the authorities “arrested not 1,400 people, but many more than that.”

Kadir warned that public perceptions of Uyghurs as a “violent” minority are fed by the official line and that Han-Uyghur violence could escalate.

Fear Of More Bloodshed

Reports from Urumqi say police fired tear gas to try to restore order when hundreds of Han Chinese armed with metal bars, clubs, and machetes marched through Urumqi, smashing Uyghur-run shops.

Earlier in the day, at least 200 Uyghurs, mainly women, protested following news that more than 1,400 people were arrested in connection with the July 5 riots. Reuters quoted a man who had participated in that demonstration as claiming that police “took them all away and took them inside.” He said there were young children among the detained protesters.

Urumqi Communist Party Secretary Li Zhi defended the broad police crackdown, saying the authorities “are protecting the safety of the women and the children.”

He added, however, that “those who took part in the riots will be dealt with severely, if they were involved in disruption and violence they will be educated.”

Official media said police on July 6 dispersed a protest by around 200 Uyghurs in Xinjiang’s second-largest city, Kashgar. Checkpoints were reportedly set up at crossroads between the airport and downtown Kashgar.

Internet connections are still largely cut off in Xinjiang, according to reports.

Outside China, officials said Molotov cocktails were thrown on July 6 at a Chinese Consulate in Munich, slightly damaging the premises. Uyghur protesters briefly scuffled with police during a protest outside the Chinese Embassy in Ankara on July 7. The consular section of the Chinese Embassy in The Hague was closed to the public, a day after protesters hurled rocks at the mission.

Humanitarian Concerns

The fresh unrest is apparently linked to a June clash between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in the southern Guangdong Province that reportedly left two Uyghurs dead.

Uyghurs outside China say claims of a terrorist threat serve as an excuse for Chinese authorities to crack down on peaceful pro-independence sentiment and expressions of Uyghur identity. They blame police for sparking the initial violence on July 5.

Rupert Colville, spokesman for UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, told a news conference in Geneva that “the high commissioner is alarmed by the large number of casualties during [the July 5] rioting in Urumqi, as well as by continuing reports of high tension and unrest in the region.”

He urged “Uyghur and Han civic leaders, and the Chinese authorities at all levels, to exercise great restraint so as not to spark further violence and loss of life” and called for an independent probe into the tragic weekend events.

Human Rights Watch’s Asia advocacy director Sophie Richardson repeated calls for an investigation. She also stressed that “our concerns are once again that we’re going to see absolutely no attention paid to due process, arbitrary arrest, possible abuse and torture of detainees. These are very real concerns in China.”

written by Andy Heil and RFE/RL correspondent Antoine Blua from RFE/RL and agency reports

https://www.rferl.org/a/Ethnic_Unrest_Continues_In_Xinjiang/1771324.html

July 7, 2009